July 20th 1940POET PATRICK Kavanagh was a regular book reviewer for The Irish Timesin the 1940s. In this review of bestseller Maurice Walsh's latest novel, The Hill Is Mine, in 1940 he was in relatively mellow mood as he pondered one of the perennial questions of fiction in his own inimitable way:
What is an artist? Can a writer of bestsellers, like Maurice Walsh, be an artist? According to one definition, an artist is one who specialises in new ways of saying nothing. He is more interested in the conveyance rather than in the thing to be conveyed. Usually he has nothing to convey except his own virtuosity.
To some extent we may find this sort of empty virtuosity in Hopkins, Eliot, the later Yeats and Joyce, and in nearly all the prose and verse innovators of the past 25 years or so.
This sort of artist is like a ploughman who has horses and plough, but no land. Not being troubled by the urgency of spring-sowing he has time to speculate on new theories of ploughing. And in this way he is often very useful.
On the other hand, the man with land may have no seeds, and then we have growths of weeds. Literary weeds are sometimes popular. Suspicion haunts the book which sells 10,000 copies. In our world 10,000 perceptive readers is an optimism too large for ears of ordinary credulity. But there is popularity and popularity.
There is the popularity of stupid, boring books, like Gone With the Wind, which hit the fashion, but there is also the eternal popularity of Don Quixote, Gil Blas or Hans Anderson's Fairy Tales.
There is a common denominator of the spirit where the vulgarian and the artist meet. Maurice Walsh, being a bestseller, it is only fair to look beneath the surface of his work. There may be an artist there.
First and foremost, he is a fine storyteller. He is an artist of theme rather than of form. Sometimes the theme may not be to our liking, but his people live, and anything may be forgiven the writer who can create life.
In many of the previous Maurice Walsh novels that I have read there was a little too much of the open-air, boy scout type. The boy scout may be said to represent civilisation at its lowest. The jamboree is the academy of illiteracy. There was also Maurice Walsh’s unfortunate weakness for a Scottish setting.
Although in his latest novel, The Hill Is Mine, he has not escaped this dreadful atmosphere, there breaks through to us time and again the light and integrity of the true artist. And his sense of humour is delightful.
His genius is his instinct for character and his ability to evoke it in a few strokes. What a pity that he refuses to give due credit to old Lucifer for the excellent job of work that gentleman has been carrying out through difficult times! A slight flavour of sin would have saved Maurice Walsh from that most damning praise to which he has left himself open – “good, clean reading for boys.” Not filth, just a little human BO!
Can a best-seller be a work of artistic merit? Of course it can. As has been suggested, there is a part of every human soul that is all high brow. A good story-teller will always have an audience. And when the story-teller is a man of poetic sensibility and human charm, like Maurice Walsh, then we have something rare.
The Hill Is Minemay not appeal to literary readers, but it will delight all who enjoy a romantic story, told with great skill, and sometimes illuminated by a poet's vision.
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